Goal: To enable organizations to share metadata across departments.
How: A simple one-to-one mapping of different terms across an organization that shares the same meaning. For example, release date may be used by a Broadcast team member and premiere date by someone who publishes content to YouTube.
Benefits: You will find that the only thing that separates us are synonyms, abbreviations, acronyms. Crosswalks level the playing field for new hires to connect internal vocabulary to industry terms.
When your organization has significant data differences, Harmonize.
All too often, data is collected differently across teams and systems. In one system, a release date can be captured as a four-digit year - in another - as month, year, and date. Enter harmonization.
Harmonization is typically needed when two systems need to connect and exchange data. This activity compares data properties such as the order of words, the type of delimiter, ordering (eg, last name first or vice versa) and how missing data is classified (eg, blank fields versus a single space).
